Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth-only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.